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Like many film-makers of his generation, Bert Haanstra (1916-1997) was a self-taught man. He started as a photographer in Amsterdam and during the Second World War, he used his talent to help the Resistance. After the war, he started working in cinema, first as a cameraman and very soon as a director. He notably learnt his job by directing a series of short films for Shell, among which Rival World (1955).
Fanfare (1958), his first feature film and fiction, was a real revolution in the Dutch cinema. The film was a great success (with a 2.5 million audience) and showed that the Dutch cinema did not limit itself to documentaries only. Fanfare was shot in Giethoorn, a small village where water is present everywhere, as in all Haanstra’s films ; water, a natural setting that is also an integral part of the Dutch people’s life. Haanstra, who was himself born in the East of Netherlands, in a higher area with more forests, observed his compatriots who live with their feet in water, in slightly similar way as when one observes animals “in a zoo”. Besides, Haanstra dedicated several films to the resemblance between man and animals Ape and Superape (1972).
One can say that Bert Haanstra was a "monument" of the Dutch cinema. He accumulated international awards – over a hundred, among which the Grand Prix in Cannes with Miroir of Hollande 1950- an Oscar in Hollywood (1960) and the Golden Bear in Berlin for Glass (1958) and the Golden Lion in Venice for Delta Phase I (1962) ; Paul Verhoeven is the only Dutch film-maker whose success can be compared to Haanstra’s. In the history of the Dutch cinema of the fifties and sixties, Bert Haanstra is just inescapable. He is, with Joris Invens, the only film-maker of this period who was also known abroad.
Haanstra was attached to his country. He almost never shot anything outside the Netherlands (except for his films about animals and the environment). This film-maker depicted, sometimes with irony but with no contempt at all, this country and its people, and this is probably what started annoying the young generation of directors and cinema enthusiasts of the sixties and seventies : according to them, Haanstra had not understood that the world was changing and that the cinema should follow the same trend. His penultimate feature Mr Slotter’s Jubiler (1979) was a failure that afflicted him very much.
Fortunately, those times have changed now and during the frequent television broadcasts of movies directed by Haanstra, the modernism of some of his films like When the poppies bloom again (1975) and the technical and artistic quality of his work are always emphasized.
Haanstra will notably leave a lasting impression thanks to his films, which are more than testimonies of past times ; they express his love towards his fellow men, which Peter van Bueren translated using this beautiful phrase : Haanstra is a “noble-hearted cinema observer”.
Harry Bos. Dutch Institute. Paris
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